It's like a library, except everyone is talking

Carmun (of which I am a founder, etc.) is getting set to launch v2.0 of its student connective wisdom, yin to the Facebook yang, product. I believe that the web presents an opportunity for businesses to take fresh looks at processes, and then create value for users from outside the traditional parameters of those processes. Education, advertising, social media are just a few of the areas where many of these opportunities exist.

I met Jon Bischke of Edu Rev last week and we were discussing how technology and connectivity (between people and ideas) are just now beginning to be applied in creative ways to learning and knowledge sharing. His company and Carmun are just two of a number that are trying to use the web to change that. We'll see what happens soon.

Restructuring Education

I found some great thoughts at elearnspace:

Restructuring Education

Love this quote by Clay Shirky: "The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the society they live in. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are transmogrified, replaced, or simply destroyed. We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the music and newspaper businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences — employees and the world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is epochal. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without radical alteration." (via Mark Oehlert).

In my mind, there is little doubt that we are at the initial stages of tremendous change to our educational structures. The way in which we interact with knowledge - co-creation, commenting, amateur peer-evaluation, openness, etc. - is strongly at odds with traditional education. Classrooms have been conceived as comprising a single prominent node (the teacher). Our daily interactions are multi-nodal. Our experience with information in multi-perspective. The question that remains for me is whether education can evolve on it's own...or whether it will be transformed/revolutionized by outside forces.

(emphasis mine).

The "evolution" of education, like the evolution of most markets (and I do consider education a market), will be driven by outside forces. I don't think, however, that those outside forces will come from companies, service providers, thinkers, etc. instead, the evolution will be derive from the students themselves. In this way, education actually won't be transformed by outside forces per se. But in the same way the students today, in their individual and social lives, co-create, comment, peer-socialize, etc. -- in the ways people are already multi-modal -- those shifts will alter education irrevocably because students will implicitly require that it happens. That transformation promises to not only create many new opportunities, but also to be extremely interesting as well.

Educational tides

"Surely this is exactly what an education institution should want – collaborative learning. They’re always banging on about the collaborative environment of a school, college or university, so why not accelerate this using the very technology that the students use anyway. The tide of web 2.0 use has flooded over the campus walls an it’s too late to stop it, so embrace it. There comes a point where bottom up becomes so compelling that it becomes the new top-down." Donald Clark

(via Edson)

Outside in learning

In looking at what I wrote are the top 10 interesting learning technology applications currently available, one common theme is that they are all "outside in" services. In other words, they don't start with the proposition that learning, or education, begins with an institution. Indeed, they all explicitly or implicitly reject that proposition and instead posit that the student, the learner, can also be at the core of education and learning.

Thus, while I do find some learning, or course, management systems to to be useful (and even necessary) applications, they are less interesting examples of leveraging technology to fundamentally shift the learning and educational paradigms.

As edugator writes:

Curration and editorial control are the two key ingredients in the secret sauce that turn information into knowledge. This is the much-overlooked other side of the Web 2.0 coin: who filters the signal from the noise? Traditional publishers who accept the paradigm shift and make their materials accessible online in new ways will continue to wield strong advantages based on well-earned reputation and competency. Meanwhile, an enormous opportunity has opened for others to step and provide context to the clutter.

Indeed, real innovation will come from doing alot more than making materials accessible online -- it will come from making connections, in a data-accessible way -- by and among information and people. It will come from giving those tools (and the control that comes from it) directly to consumers themselves in, as some have suggested, a DIY fashion. That is a paradigm shift that my top-10 list attempts to get at.

Finally, my partner Jonathan Edson recently wrote about a macro level view of this and what we are trying to do with Carmun in the context of what he calls "Intellectual Enfranchisement:"

At Carmun, we hope to build a virtual community that provides access for any and all people to that same kind of intellectual foment. If we are successfully, perhaps one day, people will feel that the education you receive has to do with what you put into it and not what institution you are lucky to attend.

Top 10 innovative educational technology services

While developing own our app, we've come across dozens of other services that sit at the intersection of education and advanced Internet technologies.

Here is a list of the most interesting ones out there, based on those that I think are advancing, or attempting to advance, the use of technology and the Internet in particular in the evolution of next-generation learning models. And, while my partner Jonathan Edson and I clearly think that Carmun is among the most interesting of these, in that it provides a suite of tools and applications for conducting research, as well as community layered on top of it for collaboration, kind of an application layer for other services, I did not list it here.

Plus this is not necessarily in order if importance, it's just a simple list. So here goes:

10. Librivox: free public domain audio books, innovative not just for distribution of non-textual material but because the volunteer nature of the service is the definition of doing something for the good of the community.

9. Curriki: while I am generally skeptical about grandiose business/idea claims without seeing the tactical implementation of those schemes, the idea of open and shared curricula is consistent with the most innovative online ventures, so this one is too big to ignore, at least for now.

8. Zotero: relatively new, but great integration with Firefox and some of the cleanest automatic citation capture available. As a project living out of George Mason University, it will be interesting to see how this grows and evolves.

7. Anystream: their "Apreso" product line allows for the capture of university-specific rich media content, and then making that content digital. A complicated task, but their vision of taking what's analog and providing for its delivery and manipulation in digital form is an interesting and large one.

6. Connotea: reference management and bookmarking tools, sets the standard for meta-data on top on research with a heavy scientific bent.

5. WorldCat: the library of libraries, the most comprehensive source catalog in the world, maybe? While I do wish for an open API that I could use for things like search and their tool set (such as ISBNdb), there is interesting stuff sneaking out of their labs such as FictionFinder, Identities, and Lorcan Dempsey's blog, suggesting that there is way more to this than a large database and, indeed, the fruits of real data analysis, manipulation and collaboration may not be far behind.

4. Google Scholar: amazingly rich database of scholarly materials, with a unique ranking/relevancy system. Returns in-books results from Google Book Search, very interesting on that front, but in any event deep, great UI and easy to use. We're seeing alot of citations being bookmarked from this over the past few weeks.

3. Stanford Wiki: while I believe that most educational and academic collaboration change has to come from the outside in ("To educate such students, we don't so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network," Henry Jenkins), this is a great example of how to do it the other way, form inside the ivory towers but using students as the change agents. Very exciting. See also PennTags.

2. Facebook, for demonstrating how to create a rich community by, for and among students.

1. Internet Archive: a digital library of web sites and other "cultural artifacts," a wonderful amazing ongoing project, is there any doubt that the importance of this increases exponentially over time?

Why Carmun?

Over the past five years, I've seen an abundance of web-based innovation centered around structuring data and different data-types.

Many interesting applications have been developed to address a similar problem: how to manage data-types in an always-connected, Internet-centric environment. Some of these data types are new and digital (digital music and photography, for example), and some are old and analog but are now being delivered and consumed in a digital world (news and information and search).

Thus, we've seen applications such as Flickr to manipulate the data type digital images. iTunes and Last.fm to manipulate digital sound data. YouTube for more streaming moving images media. Wikipedia for "objective" information. Google for search. Facebook and MySpace for social community. Huffington Post for the news. Delicious for web pages. Etc.

What I find common is that these categories of applications all solve the same problem: how to structure, categorize and manipulate different types of data in a digital presentation and application environment.

Additionally, they all use common techniques to achieve their result and bring utility to users. Namely, collaborative filtering, user generated content for creation and sharing, interoperability.

Carmun is an attempt to bring these phenomena to education. Whereas applications called social networks seem to exist to help improve one's social life, Carmun's mission is to help improve academic experience and outputs. Thus, the "data-type" Carmun attempts to help organize, share and manipulate is research: books, articles and more generally sources. It's goal is to transform the way people share, use and generate knowledge, thereby making academic tasks easier and enabling powerful new communities of learning. It will contain tools and community to achieve that.

It's a large, complicated task that solves a few problems: existing tools are expensive and not connected; the nature of education can inhibit collaboration; existing communities don't improve the academic experience. In essence, we're attempting to build a tools and collaboration "application layer" on top of education. Clarence Fischer explained it as: "Share what you know. Tear down the walls." C. Elizabeth Thomas has mixed feelings but kindly wrote that "I’m wondering why I have mixed feelings and am beginning to think it’s my paradigm shifting…." Other comments are here and here.

Education and technology

I am working on a longer post about Carmun (http://www.carmun.com/) for sometime in the next week. Needless to say, my post, and this business I founded in general, are about utilizing technology in new ways to enhance learning, connections, and learning connections.

Thus, I regularly read the work of Clarence Fisher, a teacher who writes wonderfully interesting materials on his site called Remote Access, about technology and learning. His thoughts are particularly insightful because he is a practitioner, an educator, and can therefore speak from firsthand experience.

On his site today he wrote about the familiar concept of signal vs noise, but applied to learning:

"When students are aggregating streams of content in many forms, from many sources each day, the ability to lift out certain pieces from that stream to examine them further, or to simply tag them as important to their understanding of an issue is a skill to consider. It is essential information management that has yet to make it into classrooms in any wide spread form. Understanding that a picture from flickr goes with that blog post, which built on a podcast from last week and a comment before that is a difficult, mature understanding of how content is created, distributed, and built upon."

While my longer exposition here is being written, I would also like to suggest that the tools and applications to manage this type of "information management" (the ability to take disparate, and multiplied sources of info, and make connections among them efficiently and appropriately) , in the context of education and learning, have only begun to emerge. I believe that those tools, in turn, will help spread information management into many areas, classroom included.

Carmun, Education

[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og:

So far we've predominantly been discovering better ways of representing standard course materials on webpages. This corresponds to the first phase of a new form of media: that of a new way to do old things. "Cell phones are like landlines without cords." At some point a paradigm shift occurs, and the new form of media isn't "Old Media With Feature X" but a separate thing in its own right, and gets used in apps that weren't even on the radar before; smartphones, SMS, and location-based messaging, for example. The two phenomena snowball into each other, and soon enough the world is chang'd, at least in some small way.

We're seeing the beginnings of a transformation for education as seen through the internet corresponding to just this kind of shift, where we move beyond the "put the old class material on html" and into... what? I don't know, but here are three trends I've got my eyes on; ambient information, communities of apprenticeship, and public reflection. I'll cover each of these in a separate post later on, with the disclaimer (courtesy of my friend David) that it's tough to predict a horizon that's shrinking towards you; a few years from now we'll probably look at these posts and laugh.

In the meantime, take a peek at Carmun. It's a web 2.0 startup designed to help students track and share reference lists - for instance, if I'm taking a course in educational theory, I can put articles and books from class in Carmun and they'll be there for seamless referencing and bibliography creation later on when I'm writing my final paper. Better yet, if you take the same course next semester and ask me about good books to read on the subject, I can send you my reference list via Carmun (with links to the original papers and everything) instead of copy-pasting my pdf's endnotes into an email (where you'd have to laboriously re-search for each article in JSTOR anyway). You can write notes on papers and books, rate and tag them, and generally use it as an all-purpose reading list for whatever you're interested in learning.

Carmun

Carmun is a wonderful service (where I am a founder/investor) with alot of potential. Call it social networking for brainiacs, the yin to the Facebook yang, whatever . . . but its goal is to create an online community for college and grad students by making the task of doing academic work easier. A nice social purpose, with a profit motive of course.

Cesar Brea wrote a nice post about Carmun, wherein he wrote:

Carmun is (my words) "social citation search", principally for academics,
but also for anyone trying to find (good) books or journal articles on a
topic (like school kids and college students).

Carmun helps you find good materials on your subject by crawling the Library of Congress index, and parsing out citations from footnotes and bibliographies into a structured data format (is there an RSS extension that makes sense here?). Search is "social" in that it relies on ratings by users to help filter results.

Nice description. Thanks Cesar.

I'm starting to see more rich services and applications that can loosely be defined as part of a new education/web services ecosystem, such as LibriVox, Microsoft's Live Search Books, NotePods and Shakespeare Searched.